Astronomers directly image nearby Super-Jupiter exoplanet

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Astronomers have pinpointed the location of over 1,800 exoplanets over the past few decades, using a variety of indirect techniques like gravitational microlensing and the ‘transit’ method. Last month, NASA announced it has formed a coalition to search for alien life on exoplanets, and a few weeks ago, a team of researchers measured the visible light spectrum of one for the first time. Now a different team of astronomers in Spain has directly imaged a ‘Super Jupiter’-sized exoplanet (shown above).

The giant planet is estimated to be only 150-300 million years old and 11 times the mass of Jupiter. It orbits a red dwarf star that’s 40 light years away from us — making it the closest exoplanet we’ve imaged to date. Dubbed VHS 1256b, the exoplanet orbits its star at roughly 100 times the distance the Earth orbits the Sun, and 20 times further than Jupiter orbits the Sun, the team said in a statement. The team consists of researchers from the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canaries, the Centre of Astrobiology, and the Polytechnic University of Cartagena in Spain.

“As [VHS 1256b] is young, its atmosphere is still relatively warm, [at] around 1,200 degrees Celsius,” said Bartosz Gauza, a researcher who studied for his doctorate at the IAC, and is the first author on the paper. “And it is still sufficiently luminous for us to be able to detect it with the VISTA telescope of the European Southern Observatory (ESO).”

It’s also close enough for us to study its atmosphere. VHS 1256b appears red when measured in the near-infrared, where the exoplanet emits most of its light. (It’s the tiny red dot in the left photo above.) “In its atmosphere,” said Victor Sánchez Béjar, an IAC researcher and co-author, “we have found traces of water vapor and of alkali metals, which are normal for this type of planet — but not of methane, which is also expected at these temperatures.” Given this and the planet’s distance from the sun, it’s unlikely to be one in what scientists refer to as the habitable zone for just-right, Goldilocks alien worlds.

The researchers found the exoplanet by correlating two large databases: the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS) catalog, which details the sky in the infrared, and the VISTA Hemisphere Survey (VHS) catalog, a study of the whole of the sky seen from the southern hemisphere, also in the infrared.

“The study of the red dwarf, a star on the borderline between low mass stars and brown dwarfs, has allowed us to determine the distance and the age of the system with great accuracy, and VHS 1256b is one of the few exoplanets for which those parameters are known,” said María Rosa Zapatero Osorio, a researcher at the Centre for Astrobiology (CAB) and another co-author of the study. The results of the study were published in The Astrophysical Journal.

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